The Story of Charlotte’s Web by Michael Sims

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In a recent interview on NPR, author Michael Sims discussed a project “that got really out of hand.”  He set out to do a natural history of children’s talking animal stories but became so fascinated by Charlotte’s Web that he never got beyond it.

Sim’s study, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic, was published in June.  It’s interesting see what eccentricities and other facts Sims discovered about E.B. White.

White was quite a naturalist; on a farm in Maine, he studied spiders and raised pigs.  There really was a “Wilbur,” a pig that White was raising to slaughter in the fall, but it grew sick and died, despite all attempts to save it.  In his essay, “Death of a Pig,”  White recognized the irony of his sadness at the loss of an animal he had planned to kill, and his “sense of loss when the pig died, not as if he’d just lost some future bacon but as if he had lost…a fellow creature who was suffering in a suffering world.” 

Another time, while feeding the replacement Wilbur, White noticed a spider web with an egg sac.  The spider that wove the web disappeared, and White cut the egg sac down and carried it with him back to his apartment in New York.  He dropped it in a bureau drawer and forgot about it until the little spiders began to hatch.  According to Sims, White was delighted to watch them start to weave their webs in his room – that is, until the maid refused to work “in a spider refugee camp” and they had to go.

Sims explains that “eccentric” is a Greek word that originally meant, “off center.”  He goes on to say:

if ever there was a human being born off-center, it was E.B. White. He simply could not…follow in an established path if his life depended on it. And so he had his own quirky way. He was very fierce and funny hypochondriac. He liked to spend a lot of time alone. He loved working with animals, as much as possible. Even in New York City, even in writing for The New Yorker to begin with, he was off, you know, exploring what rats were doing in some alley.

Fans of E.B. White should enjoy listening to the interview or reading the transcript:  http://www.npr.org/2011/08/19/139790016/weaving-charlottes-web.  Of interest too, will be Michael Sims’s current project.  In keeping with his theme of “writing about how our imagination responds to nature in one way or another,” he is researching between the lines of Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond to see how that great naturalist and philosopher filled up his days in ways we don’t yet know about.

Cowboys and Aliens: A Movie Review

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Can you guess what this movie is about? I couldn’t, not with precision.  I was expecting something whimsical and set in contemporary times.  Instead, we are transported to 19th century New Mexico, with bad-ass cowboys, really bad-ass aliens (think, Sigourney Weaver aliens), noble Apaches, and a beautiful pistol packing mama who is – lets just say, not from around these parts.

We open with Daniel Craig as a western  badman, who brings the same cold-eyed killer vibe to this role as he does to his other life as James Bond.  True, his circumstances are a little bit odd – his memory is gone, he wears a strange bracelet, and his wound looks suspiciously like he’s been probed.  But after a lot of opening violence, and with Keith Carradine as marshal, Harrison Ford as the cattle baron, and several appealing secondary characters – the preacher, the kid, and the barkeep – I found my belief pretty well suspended by the time the saucers flew into town to harvest the good citizens.

Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig facing long odds

We get romance, redemption, coming of age, and finding one’s courage, but more than anything else, this is a good old fashioned shoot-em-up, with some nail-biting moments, and bad guys you can hate with abandon; they are despicable, disgusting, and slimy.

Like a phoenix, Olivia Wilde is reborn in flames

If you want to be stodgy and boring, you could ask why these creatures with intergalactic technology want gold so badly, but when you get right down to it, although they are big and tough, they are not the sharpest tools in the cosmic shed.  This is a job for good old American know-how and grit, and a wee bit of help from “beyond the stars.”

Leave the stodgy questions at home, and you’ll have a very good time.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman: A Book Review

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Lev Grossman’s, The Magicians, 2009, was highlighted in a recent NPR feature on “Books for the Hogwart’s Grad.” It is an adult fantasy that begins with a 17 year old boy and does something no YA novel I’ve recently come upon has done – it nails what being 17 is really like.

On his way to a preliminary interview for admission to Princeton, Quentin Coldwater reflects on his life:  I should be happy, Quentin thought.  I’m young and alive and healthy.  I have good friends.  I have two reasonably intact parents…I am a solid member of the middle-middle class.  My GPA is a number higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be.  But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn…Quentin knew he wasn’t happy.  Why not?  He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness…But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come.  He couldn’t think what else to do.

In a passage that reminds me of my own adolescence, Quentin believes that “his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.  This couldn’t be it.  It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he had been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead.”

When he finds the interviewer dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, events catapult Quentin into “the life he should be living,” with dizzying speed.  Walking by himself in the rain after finding the dead man, Quentin is transported to the upstate New York campus of the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.

Grossman clearly has chutzpah to write of a school of magic in a decade dominated by Harry Potter, but Brakebills has little to do with Hogwarts.  After a grueling entrance exam, Quentin begins his even more grueling, five year course of study with a small group of nerdy prodigies like himself.  He’s as slammed by as much work as any freshman at Harvard or MIT.  Magic becomes truly serious for Quentin when he casts a minor spell as a joke that sets off a chain reaction resulting in another student’s death.  Like people in the real world who make such mistakes in youth, he learns to live with the guilt and “move beyond,” but it never entirely goes away.

Quentin and a few other students begin to bond, most notably, Alice who becomes his lover.  Quentin, Alice, and most of their friends at Brakebills have been entranced since childhood by the magical world of Fillory, the creation of a 1930’s reclusive English author.

Stories of Fillory are woven throughout The Magicians, but grow in importance after Quentin and his friends graduate.  They move to Manhattan, and though Alice buries herself in serious magical research, Quentin and the others settle into serious dissipation:  “They had all the power in the world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them.  They ran riot through the city.”  Happiness still eludes Quentin until he and the others discover Fillory is real and they find the means to go there.

The Magicians belongs to the adult “urban fantasy” sub-genre, and one of the characteristics of such books is a very realistic portrait of the gritty, day-to-day world we share, which makes the magic seem real when it appears.  The Brakebills graduates pass the bottle while discussing what supplies they should pack for their expedition:  how about parkas in case it’s cold?  Food of course, and trade goods – what would they be?  And weapons – handguns, and body armor, and battle magic, which they have to create for themselves, since it is forbidden

By this point in the narrative, every reader who knows Narnia, which Fillory consciously echoes, must be cringing at the thought of a bunch of armed and boozy, world-weary twenty-somethings storming the gates.  It turns out the explorers were wise to arm themselves, for Fillory is a gritty realm where strange creatures kill each other for no clear rhyme or reason.  When a human size praying mantis fires an arrow at Quentin, they realize this magic is not magical in the way the stories we loved as children are magical.

“This isn’t a story,” Alice says.  “This isn’t a story!  It’s just one fucking thing after another!”

Aside from a page-turning narrative, there is much to ponder in Grossman’s tale, and I find myself thinking of Woody Allen’s movies about movies, especially, The Purple Rose of Cairo, where a movie hero get loose in our world and is hopelessly unable to cope.  In The Magicians, characters from our world are equally out of their depths in a fictional story world.

Clinically speaking, our lives (apparently) are just one thing after another, but making stories is an instinct we all are born with.  From a two year old with stick figures, to the water cooler at work, to Jesus and Buddha, to writers of fiction, making stories is how we make sense of things.  Lev Grossman offers a fascinating reflection on making stories in the shape of a story that keeps us turning pages.

***

Lev Grossman, whose day job involves reviewing books for Time, published the second book of his trilogy The Magician King, this summer, which has moved to the head of my book queue.   Grossman is a lover, connoisseur, and advocate for the fantasy genre.  He strongly resists the notion that fantasy is “less than” other types of literature in any way.

Lev Grossman

A View From Outside Our Borders

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I had not planned to comment further on politics or the economy, but recently, in my geek mode, I was cruising for iPhone apps and downloaded the one for The Economist. I was so impressed with the first editorial I read that I decided to pass it along, as a pertinent view from an expert outside our fray.

If you favor the view that austerity is the way to prosperity in the short term, you’re likely to be disappointed because this editorial echoes others I have read suggesting that we have recently been asking the wrong questions.

The article is from the August 6, issue, “America’s Economy:  Time for a Double Dip?”   http://www.economist.com/node/21525405.  You may have to register to see it:

If America does manage to avoid recession and slowly begins to pull out of this mire, it will be testimony to its underlying strengths. It still has huge advantages over other rich countries: a younger, less-taxed population, a more innovative economy and, for now at least, the dollar as the global reserve currency. If only it had the political leaders to match, its chance of avoiding recession would be far better than one in two.

***

And now I return to my usual tricks, in particular, reading a gripping adult fantasy that I plan to review later this week.

Philip Levine: America’s New Poet Laureate

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Philip Levine - Poet Laureate of the United States

Philip Levine was born in Detroit in 1928 and started writing poetry at 13.  He hated the “prissy” stuff he learned in school and modeled the language of his early work on preachers heard on the radio.  Levine wrote many of the poems that fill his 16 books in the evenings, after working by day in the auto plants. He has been called the “poet of the proletariat.”

In announcing Levine’s appointment, James H. Billington, of the Library of Congress, called Levine

“one of America’s great narrative poets. His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling ‘The Simple Truth’—about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.”  http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/08/10/139348573/philip-levine-named-as-americas-new-poet-laureate

Levine’s collection of poetry, The Simple Truth won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995.

Here is the title poem:

The Simple Truth by Philip Levine

I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat,” she said,
“even if you don’t I’ll say you did.”
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

When he first heard of the appointment, Levine was skeptical.  “I’m fairly irreverent,” he said, “and an old union man.”  In the end he realized this was his chance to reach a wider audience than he has had in years, and he accepted.  Levine will hold the office of Poet Laureate for the coming year.

***

Learning of Levine’s appointment was not just exciting in the sense of finding a new author to read, but exciting because the central passage of “The Simple Truth,” contains a compelling challenge.  What are those things, the poem seems to ask, in my life and in yours, that are so simple and true they can stand by themselves, unadorned, beside the salt shaker and a glass of water in evening light as it falls across the table:

Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

Stories of the Fall

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I started this blog to write about stories, imagination, and spirituality.  Initially, when I spoke of stories, I meant fiction.  I now use the word in the wider sense suggested by James Hillman when he defined psychology as, “the study of the stories of the soul.”  I also use “stories” as Professor of Religion, David Loy, did in his book The World is Made of Stories, a meditation on the worldwide intuition that what we normally see is not “reality” but our stories about reality.

Right now, stories of money and its lack weigh on everyone’s mind. I have my own stories of recent events that I hesitated to share until yesterday, when I saw that Rush Limbaugh accused the president of, “engineering the decline of the American Republic.”  http://awareamerican.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/limbaugh-on-market-collapse-obama-engineering-the-decline-of-america/.  I decided that since it’s Amateur Hour, I might as well weigh in.  Here’s my story of why the United States and Europe find themselves in such a colossal mess:

***

We are still in the early stages of globalization, but no one seems to remember that.  Limbaugh should blame Al Gore for inventing the internet, the steam engine of our current post-industrial revolution.  The changes are going to take as long, be at least as sweeping, and at least as traumatic as those of the first Industrial Revolution.  Here are a few key events:

1)  NAFTA:  The North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994, marked the beginning of the end of blue collar work as a viable means of livelihood for large numbers of people in this country.

NAFTA protest

2) Offshoring White Collar Jobs:  This picked up in earnest in the late 90’s, as the internet made it feasible to hire large numbers of skilled foreign professionals for a fraction of the cost of their US counterparts.  I remember lots of phone conferences at the end of the day with engineers in Asia who would sometimes have solutions in our inbox in the morning.

The Y2K scare delayed the effects of sending thousands of tech jobs overseas, but once it was clear that the world was not going to end, the “dot com bust” ended the party for good.  Springsteen’s blue collar lyrics came true for professionals as well:  “Foreman says these jobs are going boys, and they ain’t coming back.”

3)  The Economy on Speed:  Thanks to Alan Greenspan, who held interest rates artificially low, and George Bush, who started two wars, the bust was delayed, but delayed only.  Quite a few people saw it coming:

  •  In 2004, a poster on a Motley Fool bulletin board said, “Soon our biggest industry will be selling each other beanie babies on eBay.”
  • Ca 2004, Warren Buffett called derivatives, “financial weapons of mass destruction.”
  • By 2006, people on all the financial websites were warning that a housing bust was no longer a matter of “if” but only of “when.”  The only thing no one fully realized then was how bad it would be.

Our problem now is not just that housing prices crashed in 2008, but that since the turn of the millennium, housing and consumer spending have been our major industries.

So what comes next?  Here are a few random suggestions and observations, not necessarily in order of importance.

1)  The President should demand to see Rush Limbaugh’s birth certificate.  Evidence suggests he is an alien – and I don’t mean the kind that comes from another part of planet earth:

2) On the Sunday before the debt ceiling resolution, I saw an interview with General Motors CEO, Dan Akerson, that made me hopeful.  Not only has GM paid back the government bailout, but they’ve done so with the introduction of fuel efficient cars.  Akerson articulated our need for independence from foreign oil that politicians since Jimmy Carter have talked about without effect.  Other American auto makers have echoed Akerson’s sentiment.  Now that greener energy is becoming profitable, there there is hope for eventual movement, growth and jobs in that sector.

3)  I’d like to see every Democrat in Washington read this article Julian Zelizer posted on CNN.com, “Where are the Democrat’s Ideas?”  http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/08/08/zelizer.democrats.ideas/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

4)  We all need to look at the situation in Britain as an example of what could happen here if politicians try to balance the budget with only draconian cuts.  It’s time for people who care about the country to name the Flat Earth Party for what it is – an assortment of morons who don’t understand that they live in the 21st century and not in 1776.

5) Vote against any candidate who claims to have “a plan to create jobs” – they are either deluded or lying.  In discussions I’ve heard, usually referencing Japan, the only government action that seems to work is stimulus money applied for the long term, they way you have to use a lot of matches to start a fire with wet wood.   Unfortunately, we’ve exhausted the means and will to do that.

***

If you’ve actually read to the end of my rant, thank you.  It’s no more outlandish than claiming a single man could bring down our Republic all by himself.  To paraphrase Hillary Clinton’s book, it would take a village to do that – a large village, like Washington, DC.

R.I.P. Jerry Garcia, Aug. 1, 1942 – Aug. 9, 1995

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In February, 1961,, when Jerry Garcia was 18 years old, he was a passenger in a car that flew off a curve at 90 mph.  One passenger died and two others were badly injured.  Garcia was thrown into a field and sustained only a broken collarbone.  He later said, “That’s where my life began. Before then I was always living at less than capacity. I was idling. That was the slingshot for the rest of my life. It was like a second chance. Then I got serious”

One thing he got very serious about was music, which he had practiced since early childhood.  Two months after the accident, he met Robert Hunter, a musician and poet who would become the chief lyricist for the Grateful Dead.  The two of them found a local gig and made $5 each, which helped Garcia, who was living out of his car in Palo Alto.

The story I heard was that several other key members of band met in the parking lot of Palo Alto music store in 1965.  They first played as The Warlocks in a Menlo Park pizza parlor.  After learning that another group called The Warlocks had signed a record contract, Jerry Garcia picked the name, Grateful Dead by flipping open a dictionary.  There are several accounts, but according to Phil Lesh, the bass player, the definition was:  the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial.

The Skull and Roses logo

For the next thirty years, the Grateful Dead were a cultural and musical phenomenon.  You pretty much loved them or hated them.  Back when Cal Expo was open, half my department at work would show up in their t-shirts and tie dye and take the afternoon off whenever the band came to town.  The other half of my co-workers would shake their heads.  At its best, a Grateful Dead show was a unique and extravagant celebration of life.

In August, 1995, Garcia, who was overweight, diabetic, and exhausted from touring, checked into rehab to detox from heroin.  Sometime in the early morning of August 9, his heart stopped beating.  He was 53 years old.

This is one of my favorite concert clips, for it hints at the joy the musicians could evoke in a crowd.  It’s from the Bill Graham Memorial Concert in Golden Gate Park in November, 1991.

I know the rent is in arrears,
Dog has not been fed in years,
It’s even worse than it appears,
But it’s all right.

Oh well a touch of gray,
Kinda suits you anyway,
That was all I had to say,
And it’s all right.

The Wind In the Willows by Kenneth Grahame: An Appreciation

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It was a golden afternoon; the smell of the dust they kicked up was rich and satisfying - Illustration for The Wind in the Willows by Arthur Rackham, 1940

Kenneth Grahame was a turn of the century British author who was Secretary of the Bank of England “in his spare time” (according to A.A. Milne).  In 1908, Grahame published The Wind in the Willows, his third novel.  Unlike his first two books, The Wind in the Willows was not an immediate success, though its early supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote to the author in 1909, “I have read it and reread it, and have now come to accept the characters as old friends.”

Arthur Rackham was perhaps the best known artist of “the golden age of illustration,” from 1870-1930.  His illustrations for The Wind in the Willows were his last work, published posthumously in 1940, a year after Rackham died of cancer.

Shove that under your feet, he observed to the mole, as he passed it down into the boat - Arthur Rackham, 1940

I cannot think of a more auspicious partnership in the history of book illustration, though I am biased.  I’m writing about The Wind in the Willows because I stopped by a blog that asked, “What is your favorite book?”  This has been mine since my mother read it to me when I was four.  When she finished, I begged her to start it again.  I began school determined to learn to read as soon as I could so I would not have to wait on anyone else’s convenience to row up the river with Rat and Mole.

The badger's winter stores, which indeed were visible everywhere, took up half the room - Arthur Rackham, 1940

I called this post an appreciation rather than a book review, because my intent is not to be systematic. Besides, in his introduction, A.A. Milne warns us not to dare anything so foolish:

One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows.  The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters.  The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly.  The book is a test of character.  We can’t criticize it because it is criticizing us.

She arranged the shawl with a professional fold, and tied the strings of the rusty bonnet under his chin - Arthur Rackham, 1940

The magic of this volume lies in text as well as the illustrations.  This is story of friendship, of terror in the Wild Wood, of the ache of standing outside looking in on Christmas eve.  There is slapstick and comedy, and a battle against heavy odds to restore the natural order along the river bank, but the center of the story for me has always been Chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”

Otter’s son Portly has gone missing, and one mild summer evening, Rat and Mole row the backwaters trying to find him.  They catch the strains of a haunting tune:

“It’s gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again.  “So beautiful and strange and new!  Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it.  For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever.  No!  There it is again!”

The animals follow the sound and it leads them to a place where a great Awe falls upon them and they are granted a vision:  [Mole] raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible color, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper.”

The animals find the baby otter and the vision fades, leaving them in misery as they feel what they have lost, but then, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses, and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces, and with its soft touch came instant oblivious.  For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping:   the gift of forgetfulness.  Leset the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals.

The minister in the church I attended when I was young once said from the pulpit that “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” was the best theology he knew outside the Bible.

Together, Kenneth Grahame and Arthur Rackham preserved and shared a vision of an older, idyllic England of quiet lanes and riverbanks and launched it into a new century that needed such a dream, after one World War and on the eve of a second.  Last time I looked for a gift for a friend, a facsimile edition was available (from Modern Library I believe).

There are other nice editions like the one illustrated by Michael Hague and published in 1980, for there are more ways than one into this dream.

Wind in the Willows cover by Michael Hague, 1980

I guess you could say I’ve been dreaming along with the great British storytellers all my life – with Rat and Mole, with Pooh and Piglet; in Middle Earth and Narnia; with King Arthur and his knights; with Welsh wizards and Irish warriors and Tam Lin in Faerie; Harry Potter is simply the latest feast from the cornucopia I first encountered when I was four years old.

If you have not yet discovered the magic of The Wind in the Willows (and I don’t mean Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride @Disney) I suggest you give it a look as soon as can.  In my experience (as in Bilbo’s) there is no telling where the road will take you.

The wayfarer saluted with a gesture of courtesy that had something foreign about it - Arthur Rackham, 1940